The distance of years
barely lessens its
power while offering, by reflection, an image of the time and place
in which it was written.

A group of homosexual men
gather for one's
birthday party. Perhaps a little too obviously chosen as a cross
section – there's one straight-acting one, one flaming queen, one
Jew, one Catholic, one black guy, and so on – they're bonded by
real friendship and by their shared experience as social
outsiders.

But then the surprise
arrival of a very straight and square homophobe
generates cracks in the group's unity. Largely to attack the
outsider, the host drives the others through some self-exposing and
humiliating games, in the process exposing his own neurotic
unhappiness and self-hatred most fully.

Now, there's an elephant in
the room, but I'll get to him in a little while.

The comedy of the
play lies largely in the harmlessly bitchy comments the group toss
around when things are going well and the closer-to-the-bone zingers
they resort to when things turn nasty.

The drama comes when
Crowley
guides us past the stereotypes he set up to see each of the men as
individuals coping or failing to cope with the deep unhappiness of
their lives.

Director Adam Penford and
an excellent cast find all the
play's humour and seriousness, and I have only minor cavils with any
of the characterisations and performances.

I think, for example, that
the role of Emory, the most effeminate of the group, was written to
be a very proud and self-aware man who has chosen to play the
flaming queen just to thumb his nose at the world.

(That at least is
how Cliff Gorman played him in the still-sharply-remembered 1968
Broadway production and 1970 film).

Here, James Holmes plays
him as
simply and naturally very effeminate. While that works, I think it
deprives the character of depth and also weakens the power of his
eventual collapse, since he has less of a distance to fall.

In the
central role of Michael, Ian Hallard takes a little too long to let
us glimpse the bitter self-disgust beneath the glib exterior, so his
turning on the others is more of a surprise than it should be.

Hallard has also been
directed or allowed to play almost all of his
lines face-front, constantly threatening to break the reality by
turning away from whoever he's speaking to and aiming all his charm
or nastiness directly at the audience.

Acting honours go to Mark
Gatiss as the cynical observer (and birthday boy) Harold. With a
comedian's perfect instincts, Gatiss knows exactly how to time and
deliver a pointed attack or understated but wicked commentary.

With
Harold given most of the best bitchy wit, Gatiss effortlessly makes
sure all his
moments score.

Back to that elephant. The
portrait of gay men as
neurotic, self-hating and desperately wishing they were straight is
very un-PC by today's standards.

But it is exactly that
picture –
guiding mainstream audiences away from even worse stereotypes to the
recognition that homosexuals were subject to the same sorts of
insecurities and pains, and were therefore as worthy of sympathy as
'normal' people – that made The Boys In The Band revolutionary in
the world of a half-century ago.

It is a testament to Mart
Crowley's
courage and sensitivity that, even in our supposedly more enlightened
age, the play has lost little of its power to move as well as amuse.